Soissons: The City of the Vase, the Towers of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes and the Cathedral

Required Activities

• Stand in front of the west front and work out which tower is which: the great tower finished between 1488 and 1495, the smaller one between 1516 and 1520, then walk round the back to see that there is no church behind them at all

• Stand in the rounded south transept, the oldest part of the cathedral, and count its four storeys from the floor up — great arcades, tribunes, triforium, clerestory — then cross to the north transept to find Rubens's Adoration of the Shepherds and Philippe de Champaigne's Giving of the Keys to Saint Peter of 1624

• Go down into the Romanesque crypt of about 1100 that survives under the Gothic church of Saint-Léger, then in the museum upstairs find the reliquary plan of the town and pick out on it the abbey of Notre-Dame that the Revolution destroyed, of which only two Romanesque arches are left near the church of Saint-Pierre

• Hunt the vases: start with the monument that has stood on the place Fernand-Marquigny since 1935, find Guy Lartigue's 1998 sculpture in copper, brass, granite and stainless steel, and then see how many more representations of the vase you can spot around the streets